Years ago, I was taken, as an impressionable child, to see Franco Zefirelli’s wonderful film Brother Sun, Sister Moon. So you can imagine my shock, years later, when I read the Franciscan sources, and discovered that Zefirelli’s sunlit vision of Francis and Clare of Assisi represents one particular interpretation of the story, and one that leave rather a lot out. The Franciscan sources are collected in a single useful volume entitled Saint Francis of Assisi, Omnibus of Sources, edited by Marion A. Habig. As you read through the oldest accounts of the life of Francis, one has that sense of an onion being peeled away. Some perhaps would say that in the end we can know very little about the real historical Francis, given that he was subjected to interpretation so early on. And as you read the First Life and the Second Life by Thomas of Celano (author incidentally of the Dies Irae), along with St Bonaventure’s Major Life and The Legend of the Three Companions, you notice the differences, and you spot what has been excluded and you wonder why. Famously, Thomas’s First life was judged not good enough by St Bonaventure, who commanded the author to try again, hence the Second Life. Bonaventure, the head of the Order, was very keen to present what he thought was the ‘right’ Saint Francis to the world. In particular, Bonaventure was keen to avoid too much emphasis on Francis’s supposedly riotous life before his conversion; but this, of course, has the unintended consequence of toning down the dramatic nature of that conversion. One thing, however, is absolutely clear from reading the Franciscan sources, and that is that Francis and Clare (whose feast we keep today) were given to long periods of seclusion, silence, prayer and fasting. They were penitents, and they were also religious ecstatics. As St Bonaventure himself tells us: